A teenage boy and girl sharing a drink together in the 1950s. Let’s hope it’s all they share; the situation for unmarried girls who got pregnant then was extraordinarily difficult.
Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis

Last year when I was speaking at a festival my interviewer pointed out that my writing emphatically passed the Bechdel test. Usually applied to films, the Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. I hadn’t really thought about this, I suppose because it had never occurred to me to write a book where this wouldn’t happen. I love writing strong female characters, in part because because these are the stories I loved reading when I was growing up. From Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, through Jo March in Little Women to Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, these were female characters who were determined, independent, clever and funny, and to the teenage me, they were inspirational.

My latest book, How Not To Disappear, certainly should pass the Bechdel test as it was inspired in part by the feminist road trip movie Thelma and Louise. It tells two teenagers’ stories, one contemporary, one set in the 1950s. In the contemporary story, pregnant 17-year-old Hattie takes Gloria, her great-aunt who is fond of cocktails and impractical shoes and is in the early stages of dementia, on a road trip. Gloria wants to revisit the places of her past, where it turns out there are some pretty dark secrets lurking. She wants to remember them and tell them to Hattie before they are lost from her memory. Along the journey we see Gloria’s teenage story unfold as well as Hattie’s - she is facing up to her past as Hattie faces up to her future.

Road trip: Clare Furniss’s new book was part inspired by the 1990s movie Thelma And Louise, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. Photograph: c.MGM/Everett/REX

There were many reasons why I wanted to write this story. There were strong older women in abundance in my family when I was a child and they were an important part of my life as I grew up. My own grandma had Alzheimer’s and I remember well how clearly she recalled things from her own past even though her short-term memory was so limited she couldn’t remember conversations that had taken place minutes before. When she talked about events that had happened in her childhood it was clear she could see them vividly, they were almost real to her. As a child it seemed sad but also fascinating, the fact that this younger self was stored inside her. It has long been something I’ve wanted to explore in my writing.

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I also wanted to look at how things have changed for girls and women since the 1950s - and how they haven’t. I did a lot of research around various aspects of women’s lives in the 1950s while writing the book, and in many ways the lack of power girls and women had at that time is shocking, considering this is well within living memory. The 1950s was a time when the “perfect family” - a married couple with a couple of kids, where the husband went out to work and the wife stayed at home to raise the children and cook and clean - was idealised. I wanted to reflect this in my story, how the home and lack of independence could leave women feeling imprisoned with no power. Very few girls went to university, and even those that did were likely to marry young and give up work, if not straight after they got married then certainly when they had children. Few women even had bank accounts.

In How Not To Disappear, Gloria sees this powerlessness in the life of her older sister Gwen and decides it definitely isn’t for her, and her defiance brings her into conflict with her school and her violent father. Of course there was a lot of hypocrisy about sex too. Pregnancy outside marriage was shameful and abortion was illegal, something which Hattie, the pregnant teenager in my story, reflects on - how different life would have been for her if she’d been unmarried and expecting a baby in Gloria’s time.

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Things have changed so much since then that it’s hard to imagine. Women can have high-powered careers, financial independence, they can choose their relationships, they have power over their own bodies and choices that girls in the 1950s could only dream of. Hattie in my story agonises over her decision about whether or not to keep her baby, but knows that at least it is her decision to make.

At the same time teenage girls today have many new pressures on them. The “selfie generation” of girls, bombarded by images of airbrushed, unhealthily thin models in the media, are made to feel they should look perfect 24/7. Anorexia has increased - largely, though certainly not exclusively, among girls - and is becoming more common among younger children. Self harm is on the rise too, again predominantly among girls. Social media makes it increasingly difficult for teenagers to escape external pressures and find their own space. And does the double standard about sex still exist? Doing research for How Not To Disappear I found that some pregnant teenage girls still reported being made to feel ashamed and stigmatised.

When I was a teenager we thought feminism was well on the way to having worked. We could go to university and have careers if we wanted to, we could drink pints of beer in the pub with the boys, choose the kind of relationships we wanted, and we could go and see Thelma and Louise at the cinema! Yet 25 years later there’s still a pay gap, there’s still ‘slut shaming’, and in 2014 just over half of films passed the Bechdel test. It’s as important as it ever was to show teenage girls they can be bold, independent, flawed, funny, different, and that these things are valued.